Toronto ON: Part of what I’ve always kept my eye open for have been those rare appearances of a new publication by Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, author of the trade collections suitcases & other poems (Exile, 1999), scarf (Exile, 2001) and The Refrigerator Memory (Coach House Books, 2005), as well as the chapbook poem(s) on the stairs (above/ground press, 2002). Newly out is Be Mine (subtitled “poems for you know who,” BookThug, 2010), published (as the colophon tells us) “in February 2010 so that the author may hang around in coffee shops in the west end of Toronto selling love to raise money for the victims of Haiti.” (I can only hope there’s enough love to go around).

Love Poet’s Lament

Once upon a time the editors said please don’t

send us any Poems about Poetry –

Please don’t send us your Love Poems – Now all the

good Poems are about Poetry but they still

Reject Poems about you know what – they

all say no or nope – We don’t

go for this kind of thing you don’t

have what we’re looking for right now. You should go

take this somewhere else (or) try us again

in the future. Keep writing.

Be hopeful.

A lovely little collection, I quite like the smooth lyric she’s been crafting over this past decade or more, and books for and/or about love have certainly become unfashionable, as far as the “serious writer” is concerned (treated worse, I’d say, than “humour” in poetry). Bramer, though, manages one that’s comfortable and more open, in a blending, almost, of her own sensibilities with the sentiment of iloveyougalleries author/curator Sharon Harris; why does it have to be so rare for a (serious) poem to be so open? I mean, what happened to the lyric love poem, forced to go into hiding, buried under other means, whether sly irony or undercuts? I celebrate Bramer, not only for this, but for a graceful publication of fine poems. Where (else) is the love?

Turner writes of endings, ends, continuations and new beginnings, often concurrently. Turner’s poems in this small collection are all about perspective, it seems, turning, twisting and morphing. When is an end an end, and not? Who is the perspective, exactly, being written for, or from?

open form virtue craves

cadences that should be banned

rivers get written up and

their energy sold such paper

convergences belie your/our

finger stroking the clay bed

or searching for clay babies

to dry where rocks lie in sun (“brought back down to earth with a bang / or the day starts with a bang”)